The second line also marked a defining moment in the city’s post-Katrina life. On January 15, 2006, exiled New Orleanians came in from all over the country to march in the city’s first official second-line parade since the storm. Around the country, naysayers were talking down New Orleans, saying that we weren’t going to ever be the same. New Orleanians both living in the city and those trying to move back showed up for the All-Star Second Line Parade, put on by thirty-two of the city’s social aid and pleasure clubs. Three brass bands and thousands of New Orleanians paraded for hours through some of the worst-hit black neighborhoods near downtown.
“Neighborhoods that were just totally abandoned, shipwrecks, were alive that day,” said Jordan Hersch, a parade organizer, in a public radio interview. “Families hanging out on the porch, smoke in the air from people grilling, having lunch, waiting for the band to come around.
“It was about letting people know that this culture is forceful, and it’s meaningful, and it’s powerful,” he continued. “It is what can bring the city back to life.”
Amen. Those paraders were reaching back into our collective history as New Orleanians to find their song beneath the debris and devastation left by Katrina. Their dance and song that day was a conjuring that summoned the past into the present to make way for a future that many doubted New Orleans would have. It was a ceremony of innocence that Katrina’s tide could not drown. It was the casting out of the spirit of despair and defeat. It was a rite of resurrection.
MY OWN ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTION to the resurrection culture emerging in post-Katrina New Orleans had consequences for my own life far beyond the realm of art—consequences I scarcely could have imagined when a creative door in New York City opened in Katrina’s aftermath, and I walked through it.
In the spring of 2006, theater director Christopher McElroen mounted a production of Waiting for Godot in Harlem. Because the plight of post-Katrina New Orleans reminded McElroen of Beckett’s play, he set his 2006 version in a waterlogged city. The drama takes place on the roof of a house surrounded by floodwaters (McElroen literally encompassed his set with fifteen thousand gallons of water). I played Vladimir; J. Kyle Manzay played Estragon. The Harlem production ran for five weeks, with The New York Times calling it “dazzling,” adding, “Who knew this play could still surprise?”
The biggest surprise was yet to come. That fall, New York artist Paul Chan traveled to New Orleans to teach art classes at Tulane University. He had never before been to the Crescent City. Seeing what Katrina had done shocked him to the core. Chan had been to shattered postwar Baghdad and to the bleak postindustrial landscape of Detroit; in both places, he observed signs that life continued, despite catastrophe.
“New Orleans was different,” he later wrote.
When he toured the Lower Ninth Ward, seeing the wild vegetation, the desolate roads, and concrete foundations that were all that remained of family homes, he was staggered. To stand within the precincts of a major American city and hear nothing at all, endlessly, was like being frozen in amber. As he waited there for his ride to pick him up, it occurred to Chan that he was standing in a place he had never been, but also one he had been to many times.
“It was unmistakable. The empty road. The bare tree leaning precariously to one side with just enough leaves to make it respectable. The silence,” he wrote. “Standing there at the intersection of North Prieur and Reynes, I suddenly found myself in the middle of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.”
Why Godot? As Chan put it, there was a “terrible symmetry” between post-Katrina New Orleans and Beckett’s absurdist drama, a parallel that “expresses in stark eloquence the cruel and funny things people do while they wait: for help, for food, for hope. It was uncanny.”
Beckett, an Irish émigré living in Paris, wrote what would become one of the twentieth century’s towering artistic achievements, based on his experience in Nazi-occupied France. He and his wife served the underground French Resistance and endured conditions of poverty, hunger, and extreme uncertainty. Everything civilized people thought they knew about the way the world worked had been taken from them—at first by the Great War, and then by this Second World War, which brought the barbaric Nazis flooding over the French border, engulfing the country.
Would deliverance from the Nazis come? How does one get on with daily life in the absence of a reason to hope for salvation? These are the questions at the heart of Godot, which Beckett dubbed a “tragicomedy.” It’s not a tragedy, strictly speaking, because the fault for the suffering of Didi and Gogo is not in their nature, nor is it within their power to change their fate. It’s not exactly a comedy either, because though the script is laced with mordant wit, based in the absurdity of trying to make sense of life in conditions of utter ruin, there is no happy ending.
Yet there is hope. Godot might come tomorrow. You never know. In any case, we have to get on with the business of living.
When he returned to New York, Chan began thinking about staging a production of Godot in the Lower Ninth Ward. He explored what the writer and public intellectual Susan Sontag accomplished in Sarajevo in 1993, mounting Godot in the darkness and despair of that once beautiful city as besieging Serbian forces lashed it with shelling and sniper fire from the surrounding hills.
Sontag, who died in 2004, risked her life to bring theater to Sarajevo. She was also criticized by some in the West for what they saw as a pretentious stunt, one that, by showcasing a play notoriously bereft of uplift, only made it more difficult for Sarajevans to bear the burden of daily life.
In a 1993 New York Review of Books essay, Sontag defended herself from these critics. “In Sarajevo, as anywhere else, there are more than a few people who feel strengthened and consoled by having their sense of reality affirmed and transfigured by art,” she wrote.
“People in Sarajevo know themselves to be terminally weak: waiting, hoping, not wanting to hope, knowing that they aren’t going to be saved,” she continued. “They are humiliated by their disappointment, by their fear, and by the indignities of daily life—for instance, by having to spend a good part of each day seeing to it that their toilets flush, so that their bathrooms don’t become cesspools. That is how they use most of the water they queue for in public spaces, at great risk to their lives. This sense of humiliation may be even greater than their fear.”
Because Sarajevo was such a wonderful place to live before the war, the degradation war forced on the cosmopolitan city made the despair of its people especially acute. As Sontag observed, “That kind of idealization produces a very acute disillusionment.”
All of this could have been written of storm-savaged New Orleans, whose fall grieved its remaining people more than I can adequately say. None of us thought our city was paradise before the storm. There was crime. There was poverty. There was racism, and ignorance, and corruption. But there was also a joy of living, and a style of living, that existed nowhere else in America, and a grace and grandeur that made New Orleans a city of dreams.
The flood took that from us, leaving us with death, destruction, displacement, and a citizenry who, in too many instances, behaved like vultures feeding off putrid carrion. In so many ways, post-Katrina New Orleans was a wasteland in which, to paraphrase William Butler Yeats, the best of us lacked conviction that we knew the road home to the city we had once loved, and the worst were full of a passionate intensity that was determined to prevent us from finding it.
This was Beckett territory. Chan contacted Creative Time, the Manhattan-based art production company best known for erecting the twin shafts of light in the ruins of the World Trade Center, to see if it would be willing to produce a New Orleans staging of McElroen’s version of Godot—not acted in a theater, but at the Lower Ninth Ward crossroads where he first conceived the idea.
Chan started making twice-monthly trips down South to lay the groundwork for the play. He was determined to avoid accusations of being a drive-by
New York artist, condescending to the locals by giving them art they didn’t ask for and couldn’t relate to. He got to know local folks and asked them to help out with the production if it interested them. One of the most important figures in this respect was Robert Green, Sr., a Lower Ninth Ward resident who had lost family in the storm, and who was then living in a FEMA trailer.
“He was so many things to me: conscience, friend, security,” Chan wrote in a 2010 “field guide” Creative Time assembled to document the project. “He knew everyone in the Ninth Ward. That’s what community means. He knew the person who owned the gas station up the street, he knew the kids who were running a new barbershop on the second floor of that gas station, he knew the churches in the area. He knew Pastor Hayward at New Israel Baptist Church. A lot of the places that he introduced me to when we were organizing Godot were churches, because they were still organizing people when many had left and no one else cared or had the time. We would go to church Saturdays and Sundays, and it helped that I was familiar with Scripture.”
I helped with this as well, introducing Paul and his team around New Orleans, lending my perspective on where to go, what to see, and whom to talk to. Paul threw himself into teaching and lecturing anywhere in the city that would have him, sharing his gifts and expertise with local art students and organizers, and working with the arts infrastructure that already existed in the city. He went to churches—one Lower Ninth Ward pastor preached a Godot-themed sermon, “Waiting for God to Do”—he went to neighborhood association meetings, and he participated in two potluck dinners in the Lower Ninth Ward. Paul also quietly set up what he called a “shadow fund” to leave behind money to help the work of eleven arts and community organizations whose work he saw and admired during his New Orleans sojourn.
By the time he moved to New Orleans full time in August (to teach art classes for free at Xavier University and the University of New Orleans), his Godot production had spread roots throughout the community. The play would truly grow out of organic relationships that Paul, director Chris McElroen, and their company cultivated in the months leading up to the play. The New Yorkers committed themselves to allowing the reactions and the advice of local artists, community organizers, and others to drive their decision making. They did not want to be called carpetbaggers, or in any way to be seen as exploiting the city’s pain so they could feel good about themselves.
The team learned quickly that business in New Orleans is rarely straightforward. You have to be prepared to wait, to tolerate inefficiency, and to meet people face-to-face—usually over a meal. And you have to be prepared to listen. Night after night, we met with folks all over the city, telling them what the play was about, why we were doing it here, and asking them how we could do it right.
One of the most important decisions the team made early in the process was to go beyond the Lower Ninth Ward with the play. The Lower Ninth was famous the world over for what it had suffered, but there was intense pain and frustration citywide. Tulane art historian Pamela Franco suggested taking Godot to Gentilly, where, unlike the now vacant Lower Ninth, most of the housing was still standing, if gutted by the flood.
Godot is seemingly a simple play to stage, with a small cast and minimal set design. But doing it in a neighborhood that had been devastated by a hurricane (Gentilly), and in one that had been obliterated by the storm (the Lower Ninth), was especially challenging. Plus, most of the production team lived in New York and had to shuttle back and forth, greatly complicating matters. Though the budget was bare-bones, Paul and his team were committed to making every effort to stage a first-rate production for the city.
Months of endless community meetings, potlucks, forums at schools, homes, churches, bars, and theaters around town paid off. Producer Gavin Kroeber said later that without the volunteers and the active goodwill of so many New Orleanians, the show would not have come off. He credited the post-Katrina politicization of so many city residents and their passion for resurrecting New Orleans culture for drawing such a diversity of local folks to the unusual project.
“I’ve often wondered how likely it would be for an absurdist play to bring such a breadth of community partners to the table in, say, Brooklyn, San Francisco, Atlanta, or even the ‘slow-motion Katrinas’ of the American Rust Belt,” Kroeber mused in the post-production field guide.
Rehearsals started in October 2007, in an abandoned school in the Upper Ninth Ward. Signs began appearing on trees and utility poles all over town, saying cryptically: A country road. A tree. Evening—the stage setting given by Beckett in the play. The town began buzzing about what was coming. We were going to deliver two performances in the Lower Ninth Ward on the first weekend in November, and two the weekend after in Gentilly—in front of a storm-gutted house less than two miles from Pontchartrain Park.
It’s impossible not to be nervous on any opening night, but this one was like no other I had ever experienced. This was my city. These were my people. I was going to give everything I had to them, both those living and those who had passed in the storm. Would it be received? An expatriate New Orleanian named Randy McClain gave me reason to believe it would.
McClain and his family had left New Orleans in 2003 for Nashville, but had never forgotten the city. He had been reading about our Godot production in The Times-Picayune’s online edition and wrote the newspaper a letter that it published just before we opened. In it, McClain said that his teenage son was an aspiring actor.
“I want him to see how a neutral ground stage can become a place of social and political comment and a play can be a call to action,” McClain said in his letter. “I want my son to see theater that touches lives and does more than just entertain. So, we’re driving nine hours, lawn chairs in the trunk, to see art.”
How many Randy McClains could we count on? I had my answer when I converged on the Lower Ninth Ward on opening night and saw the headlights of an endless stream of cars, all filled with people going to see art. On that magical evening, hope floated atop the river of light flowing into the basin of night.
Waiting for Godot begins with the two tramps, Vladimir (also called Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), standing under a bare tree.
ESTRAGON: Nothing to be done.
VLADIMIR: I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. So there you are again.
In that first exchange between Didi and Gogo, the play lays out its philosophical concerns. Do we quit struggling and resign ourselves to fate—or do we resist? And if we are to resist, on what basis should we hope that we might succeed? Vladimir concedes that the weight of the burden is “too much for one man.”
“On the other hand,” he continues, “what’s the good of losing heart now, that’s what I say.”
The pair spends the first act making small talk, mostly, revealing that they have been traveling together virtually their entire lives and have grown dependent on each other. They repeat lines and gestures, indicating that the course of their lives has been charted out by petty rituals and exchanges meant to pass the time together. They are, we find, waiting for Godot, a mysterious figure whose arrival will make everything right again. Didi’s belief that Godot will come makes everything bearable and keeps the thought of suicide at bay. Why kill yourself when there is hope that tomorrow help will come? They meet a wealthy man, Pozzo, who is headed to the market to sell his slave, Lucky. Later, a boy comes to them, a messenger from Godot, saying that he won’t be coming today, but will arrive tomorrow.
BOY: What am I to tell Mr. Godot, Sir?
VLADIMIR: Tell him . . . [he hesitates] . . . tell him you saw us.
All Vladimir wants at that point is to know that their suffering did not go unobserved by the man who has it in his power to end it. It’s as if the assurance that Godot knew what they were going through, even if he didn’t rescue them, would be e
nough to give Didi and Gogo hope to hold on for one more day. Surely if Godot got word of what they were enduring, he would hasten to help them. Surely.
The first act ends with Didi and Gogo vowing to leave this place. But they do not move. In the second act, more or less the same things occur, which caused one critic to quip that Beckett “has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.” So much of life, Didi comes to understand, is about playing the same games, over and over, and expecting a different outcome. But this time, Didi has two awakenings.
In the first, Didi delivers the play’s most important lines, telling Gogo that they should shut up and act to help suffering Pozzo.
Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say?
Soon after this, a furious Pozzo departs the scene with a declaration that life is meaningless. “They give birth astride of a grave,” he says, of human beings, “the light gleams in an instant, then it’s night once more.”
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